In the field of travel accommodations searching and booking, customers are presented with many options. Travel websites such as Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity permit customers to search for room accommodations in a given locale for a given date or range of dates. For example, a customer seeking a room accommodation on New Year's eve in New York City might visit such a website and enter or select “New York, N.Y.” in a “city” or “destination” field on the page and enter or select a check-in date of December 31 and a check-out date of January 1. The website would then use the customer's information to search its database for rooms available in New York for those days, presenting a list of hotels with bookable rooms. However, if the customer is seeking certain features, most hospitality or travel websites require the customer to read the detailed description of each of the hotels listed in the search results in order to determine whether the features are offered at any of them. Additionally, even if it can be determined that a particular listed hotel generally offers the feature, these web sites offer no provisions for determining whether the desired feature will actually be available and no provisions for actually reserving, booking or paying for the feature with or without a room booking.
Other travel websites, such as hotels.com, BookIt.com and Google Hotel Finder, offer a similar accommodation search dialog and similarly display search results for hotels in a particular location with available rooms in the desired period. These sites differ, however, from other sites in that hotels listed on the search results page may be “filtered” by the customer, who may choose to have displayed only results matching additional criteria, such as being in a particular neighborhood or having certain general amenities. Filter selections are made by the customer by way of drop-down or check-box selections; however, only a limited selection of general amenities is provided. For example, Google Hotel Finder's amenity filter list includes only air-conditioned, bar, beach access, business center, gym, internet, parking, pets allowed, pools, restaurant, accessible facilities, children welcome, laundry and room service. Hotels.com's list has similar amenity filters and adds a few more, including free breakfast, cribs available, and spa. Free-form feature search, i.e., permitting the customer to enter or type a desired amenity, special service or food/beverage into search input form, is not provided. However, even if the customer limits display of search results to hotels meeting these certain limited criteria, the customer is not provided an opportunity to determine availability, much less book or reserve, a particular amenity with a room booking. In fact, Google Hotel Finder and another hotel amenity search web site employing the check-box approach, juicyhotels.com, do not even provide for room bookings through the site. Customers must perform the room booking through the hotel's web site, another travel web site such as BookIt.com, Travelocity or Orbitz, or through a non-web-based means.
OpenTable, a restaurant search web site, offers a similar customer interface. Customers select a general location such as a city or neighborhood and a time in addition to a date. The site will search for available accommodations and present a list of restaurants matching the selection criteria and availability. Similarly to some of the hotel search sites, OpenTable offers customers the ability to filter the results list based on additional criteria such as cuisine style and price range. OpenTable can also display lists of restaurants having “private dining facilities” such as chef's tables, function rooms and private dining rooms. However, customers cannot directly determine availability or price or book such private dining features through the web site. Customers are provided a phone number and contact name or can use a web page form-based inquiry. UrbanSpoon, another restaurant search web site, additionally offers customers a list of selectable restaurant “items” including “private parties” and “live music” for filtering restaurant lists; however, there is also no provision for determining availability or price of those items for a given date and time or for booking a table with the item. As with the other hospitality or travel web sites, there is no free-form arbitrary search and purchase function for features. Customers are limited to filtering results according to pre-selected items and amenities.
Yet another system, Orion from Ascension Software, is a web-based platform used by hotels to provide guests online access to room service and amenities gift ordering. However, Orion does not permit arbitrary feature searching or purchasing. Rather, Orion provides “catalogs” of amenities and services available for ordering. Additionally, Orion does not offer the possibility of booking or reserving a room in conjunction with ordering amenities or services.
Accordingly, there is a need for an a la carte hospitality/travel and accommodations system that provides customers the option to search and purchase features within or separate from accommodation venues having desired, bookable/ticketable amenities and/or special services and/or food/beverage available for the desired date(s) and time(s) and the additional capability to book/purchase such features with the capability, but not the requirement of booking an a la carte accommodation such as a room or table at a restaurant. Additionally, there is a need for customers to be able to enter free-form, arbitrary search items to query for desired features.